Georgetown professor: Time to shake-up school funding

The Pennsylvania Basic Education Funding Commission held a session on school funding in the Parkland School District on Tuesday.

The Pennsylvania Basic Education Funding Commission held a session on school funding in the Parkland School District on Tuesday. (MORNING CALL FILE PHOTO)

Of The Morning Call

How one professor would fix Pa.'s school funding formula

A Georgetown University researcher on Tuesday urged Pennsylvania's Basic Education Funding Commission to adopt a new student-based funding model that gives schools more control over their spending.

Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown's Edunomics Lab and a research associate professor, testified for more than 90 minutes during the commission's hearing at Parkland School District's administration building.

She told the panel of state legislators and officials that Pennsylvania's current funding system is among the country's worst in terms of "grandfathering" funding to districts and lags behind other states that have already shifted to a primarily student-focused formula.

Commission co-chair Sen. Pat Browne, R-Lehigh, introduced Roza by saying she would present provocative information. She immediately she took issue with his characterization because she said she believes her presentation is "extremely straight forward."

Roza suggested the state base funding to its 500 school districts on a flat per-student rate with additional money for students with greater needs, such as poor students or English language learners.

"You're not using a formula right now, you're just using a grandfather clause," Roza said. "That's not a student model, that's a last year's spending model."

The basic education line item is the largest in the state's education budget and to a degree takes into account poverty rates and local tax collections, among other factors.

A "hold harmless" clause that dates to 1994 says districts cannot get less money in the basic education subsidy line item than they got the previous year, and for the past few years districts have simply received whatever they did the previous year, plus the possibility of extra money in other line items

The rest of the education budget, including for special education spending, is derived from other formulas or political whims.

Roza recommends eliminating the hold harmless clause to ensure adequacy and equity in funding. She also called for the state to reduce educational mandates or at least offer waivers so that districts will have the flexibility to pursue their own ideas for improvement.

Pennsylvania, like states throughout the country, hasn't focused enough on tying its education spending to outcomes, Roza said.

"We haven't yet asked the system to work on getting the most bang for the buck," Roza said. "The result is a very poor relationship between spending and performance."

The state should create a data system schools can use study the spending and performance of their peers, Roza said. Then, more spending decisions should be shifted to principals, who can direct funds in the way that's most effective for improving that school's performance, she said.

Targeted investments by the state, such as giving schools money to use for reducing class sizes or providing after school programs, should be replaced by grants schools can seek to launch their own innovative programs that actually reduce expenses in the long run, Roza said.

In other states, schools have had success offering their elite teachers extra pay in exchange for taking on larger class sizes, she said.

Acting Secretary of Education Carolyn Dumaresq , a member of the commission, said she's not opposed to any of Roza's suggestions. She found the presentation intriguing and considers it a challenge, she said.

State budget Secretary Charles Zogby, also a member of the commission, pointed to two inherent obstacles in shifting spending decisions out of the state capital or central administration and into the principal's office.